Ms. Kennedy Regrets

She’s unable to be in the Senate today.

Had Caroline Kennedy suddenly panicked? “That’s a tough thing for anyone, giving away the life you’ve had,” a friend says.Credit Illustration by Robert Risko

Last Tuesday, Caroline Kennedy attended the Presidential Inauguration. The sun was shining on the Capitol, the sky was blue, the Marine Band was playing. Barack Obama, for whom she had campaigned ardently for nearly a year, believing him to be a leader who would inspire the country to greatness in the way that her father did, was about to become President. If ever there was a day to bolster a person’s resolve to become a senator, this was it. And indeed Caroline Kennedy appeared stirred and happy and as determined as ever to become a part of the moment.

Then, on Wednesday, something happened to change her mind. That evening, she called Governor David Paterson—whose prerogative it was to appoint Hillary Clinton’s successor to the Senate—to withdraw her name from consideration. What the something was, almost nobody knew. It was clearly not so serious as to be decisive, because she appeared to waver—people from the Kennedy circle at first denied that she was out of the running, and apparently people in Paterson’s camp tried to persuade her to put herself back in again. But by midnight on Wednesday her decision was final: she was out.

The announcement took everybody by surprise. Even her closest friends had had no idea on Tuesday that it was coming. What could have happened? Nobody believed it was about Ted Kennedy’s collapse, as the Times initially reported. That didn’t make any sense—he’d been seriously ill for months. And his staff was said to be angry that his illness was being blamed. It was reported, on Thursday afternoon, that she had a household-employee problem and a tax problem, but even this, true or not, didn’t answer all the questions: given that Paterson (according to some, contradicted by others, in a blizzard of claims and counterclaims) had apparently urged her to reconsider her decision, he evidently didn’t regard the problem as disqualifying. By Friday morning, the situation had degenerated into open warfare, with some in Paterson’s camp claiming that he hadn’t meant to pick her anyway, and some in Kennedy’s camp claiming that he had meant to pick her, that there was no nanny problem, and that the Governor was destroying an American icon out of pique. “This is a governor who lost his chief of staff a couple of months ago to the weirdest tax scandal imaginable, whose first day required him and his wife to discuss the affairs that they had during their marriage and whether or not government money was used for the hotel rooms, and he has people pushing vile comments about Caroline Kennedy?” Lawrence O’Donnell, a friend of hers and a political analyst for MSNBC, says. “And when they get into that phrase ‘not ready for prime time’? This is the ‘not ready for prime time’ governor you’re watching.”

As for Caroline Kennedy’s last-minute withdrawal, her friends were left to speculate. Had she suddenly panicked? Had she realized that she’d be signing on for more and more misery, of which the past few weeks had been just a foretaste? That her days would consist of drudgery—fund-raising phone calls, trudging up to frozen, decrepit towns she’d never heard of? That there would be no more leisurely summers in the Hamptons, no more spontaneous long lunches with friends, no more undisclosed finances? Had she realized, in short, that she wanted her old life back?

A couple of weeks before Christmas, just before she declared her interest in the Senate, she went to the birthday party of a friend she’d known since high school. Several other of her oldest, most trusted friends were there. All of them thought she’d be a great senator; they were very supportive of her making a bid. But when they asked her about her decision to run she looked scared and panicky and couldn’t talk about it. She folded her arms over her chest, a guest recalled, and disappeared into herself—a characteristic gesture. Even before things started to go sour, in other words, she was apprehensive about what lay ahead. Then, a week or two later, after the tabloids and the upstate papers had at her, she attended another friend’s birthday party and looked as though she’d just disembarked from a very steep and terrifying roller coaster: shaken, startled, roughed up.

Her coming out had gone worse than even her detractors could have hoped. She gave a few interviews to the press and became famous for saying “you know” two hundred times in thirty minutes. An aide to Mayor Bloomberg tried to secure endorsements for her by telling people that she was going to be the next senator, so they’d better get on board early, but his aggressiveness backfired and turned people against her. Local politicians made snippy comments. Representative Gary Ackerman, of New York’s Fifth District, in Queens and Long Island, compared her to J. Lo. “One of the things that we have to observe is that DNA in this business can take you just so far,” Ackerman said, on “Face the Nation.” “You know, Rembrandt was a great artist. His brother Murray, on the other hand—Murray Rembrandt wouldn’t paint a house.”

In late December, New York voters preferred her for the Senate seat to Andrew Cuomo by thirty-three per cent to twenty-nine, but by early January, according to one poll, they preferred Cuomo by fifty-eight per cent to twenty-seven. Governor Paterson had clearly become irritated with the situation. “The notion that I have to take Caroline is not coming from me,” he told the Buffalo News. “Why do you all pay so much attention to her? She’s just another person. So what?” A Democratic Party consultant told the News, “He’s not responding well to outside pressure. He’s telling people, it would seem, that it’s his decision and he doesn’t like being pushed around.” Even the favorable comments she received did not always redound to her benefit. “I somehow can’t see her as being corrupt. It’s not her legacy,” Marie Owen, a sixty-nine-year-old flute player who lives on the Upper West Side, told the Times, when asked what she thought about the prospect of Caroline Kennedy’s becoming a senator. “I kind of like the idea, maybe because I’m old.”

Caroline Kennedy had many friends who had had ample experience with both the press and politicians, and many of them felt that the rollout had been handled stupidly. The public-relations firm she hired to advise her clearly didn’t know what the hell they were doing, throwing her out there like that—they didn’t understand her. “She’s not glib, in the way that predictable politicians can be glib,” Richard Plepler, a co-president at HBO and a friend, says. “She is thoughtful, articulate, fundamentally decent, and if you discussed any number of complicated issues with her currently part of the political dialogue she would be both informed and deeply thoughtful.” When she met someone without a tape recorder running, she tended to make a good impression. “You always get a sense of entitlement or a sense of royalty, whether it’s the Rockefellers or the Kennedys, and she never came off like that at all,” Al Sharpton, who shared a photo-op lunch with her at Sylvia’s, the restaurant in Harlem, soon after her announcement, says. “It was never like she felt like you were honored to meet her. She came off very studious, very sober, very serious. And I had that impression of her way before she ever thought about politics.”

Why, the friends wondered, had she given those interviews without practicing first? The “you know”s should have been drilled out of her. Yes, under ordinary circumstances she was perfectly articulate, and she’d given lots of interviews before, but this wasn’t chatting with Charlie Rose on a book tour. This was a shark tank. Everyone was always so careful around her—were they too afraid to tell her she needed help? She likely would not have minded some interview preparation. Having been around politics all her life, she must have been vividly aware of how a misplaced word could destroy a career. “She was really worried about doing something to screw up Obama on the campaign,” a friend says. “She’s very self-conscious. She’s always like, ‘I don’t know what I think, don’t ask me.’ “ Or maybe the mistake was talking to the press at all. Maybe it would have been better if she’d released a short, gracious statement submitting her name to the Governor and listing a belief or two, and then retreated into humble silence. Not, please not, this comedy with the upstate campaign tour that wasn’t an upstate campaign tour, with her leaping in and out of her car every ten minutes like she was delivering pizza.

The basic problem, the friends felt, was that reporters had failed to see the smart and decent person behind the stammering. In fact, they believed, it was precisely because she was smart and decent that she had found herself in this mess. “Most people have never had the experience of selling themselves publicly with TV cameras on,” O’Donnell, who worked for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan for many years, says. “Most of us have modesty impulses—you don’t want to brag—and you have to learn to defy these basic human impulses and say, ‘I am the greatest, and here is why you need me for this job,’ and do it without any hesitation or any doubt. Which is inhuman.” Her attempts at jokes somehow fell flat. When one of the Times reporters asked her at what point she decided to seek the Senate seat, she’d said, “Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman’s magazine or something?” “That was an example of her wry sense of humor,” a friend says. “She’s always ready with a quip. It’s disarming, it’s meant to undermine the reverence that people sometimes attach to her.”

As the weeks went by, people who were not her friends questioned whether she had the fluency or the toughness to fight for the Senate seat, as she’d have to in 2010. Could she handle the hot dogs and the fried dough? Was she ready for Utica? This sort of questioning drove the friends insane. It was so irrelevant. After all, she didn’t have to campaign in the same way that an unknown person has to. People already knew who she was, she already had their attention. They even already knew more or less what she stood for: she was a Kennedy—she’d been born with a platform. “This is the part that I have found most absurd in the press coverage: a childish level of analysis of what’s involved in campaigning in New York State, how many hands do you have to shake in state fairs and what kind of smile do you have to have, as though it’s something extraordinarily difficult to master,” Lawrence O’Donnell says. “The politics of campaigning are so simple: I’m going to beat you and leave you dead in a snowbank in New Hampshire and never look back. But in the Senate you can be trying to prevail over another senator on Tuesday afternoon whose vote you know you’re going to need on Wednesday afternoon for something else. The ordinary work of the Senate never involves fighting. Virtually all the people who run for Senate seats lie and say they’re going to fight, but what they’re actually going to do—which they may not know when they go to Washington for the first time—is beg. And beg people like me, whom they’ve never heard of, the staff director of this or that committee, before they ever get to meet the chairman. So the personal qualities necessary for Senate work are politeness and charm and graciousness and generosity, which New York tabloids have no comprehension of. Why should they? The press is never allowed in the rooms where governance actually takes place.”

Caroline Kennedy’s friends are always saying how normal she is, and it appears that they are right. Normal people do not run for the Senate. Normal people with lots of money and families that they like tend to want to enjoy the money and the families. They do not spend their winters on the phone grovelling for support, or their summers at obscure state fairs ingesting disagreeable and fattening local food. Caroline Kennedy is normal. Until recently, she wasn’t even sure how much she wanted to work at all.

It was, evidently, Jacqueline Kennedy’s intention to raise children who were as unaffected as possible by the extraordinary circumstances of their lives, and it seems that she succeeded: Caroline Kennedy’s life has in many ways been indistinguishable from that of any other smart and reasonably diligent child raised on Fifth Avenue in the nineteen-sixties. She went to Sacred Heart School in New York in the lower grades, and then to Brearley. She was close to her brother; she resented her stepfather. In tenth grade, she went to boarding school at Concord Academy, where she smoked, like everybody else, and wore clogs, like everybody else. She put on weight and was hounded by her mother about it. (At her fiftieth-birthday party, according to one guest, many of the family toasts were about her obsession with being thin.) She had moments of greatness: according to the biographer C. David Heymann, when the police discovered pot plants that her cousin David was growing in her back yard in Hyannis Port, she took the blame.

After high school, she spent a year in London taking an art course at Sotheby’s. She went to night clubs and had a love affair. She went to Radcliffe. She majored in fine arts. She did the usual college things. The summer after her freshman year, contacts of her mother’s helped her obtain an internship at the News, and after college she went to work in the educational-film department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While there, she met a designer of museum installations named Edwin Schlossberg, and married him when she was twenty-eight.

After a few years at the Met, she decided to go to law school at Columbia. She interned for a summer at her mother’s lawyer’s firm, but then decided she didn’t want to practice. “I think that, like a lot of people who go to law school, she wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted to do with her law degree,” Ellen Alderman, a friend from law school, says. “We were taking it more as we went along.” It seems as though Caroline did not, at the time, have a sense of what she wanted to do with her life or a measure of her own ambition. “I would say it was very much like her mom’s,” a friend says. “Her mom wanted to get smart things done, and she wanted to have some fun, and I think that’s probably what Caroline thought. She thought, I’m going to stay in New York, on the Upper East Side, I’ll marry this smart guy, that’s good, I’ll hang out with my three good friends from school, and we won’t do anything crazy. I’m stabilizing things up here—John can move downtown. Jackie was like, Relax, let’s have lunch, let’s go for a swim, have you read this book?”

At law school, she and Ellen Alderman decided that, since the two-hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights was coming up, they would write a book together about it. They travelled around the country, interviewing people who had been involved in cases in which the principles of the Bill of Rights had been tested. The result, “In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action,” was more pedagogical than analytical: “A 1987 newspaper poll showed that 59 percent of Americans could not identify the Bill of Rights,” the Authors’ Note at the front of the book begins. “It seemed to us that an unfortunate gulf exists between those who know about the law and those who do not.” The book sold very well, and a little while later Alderman and Kennedy decided to write a similar book, “The Right to Privacy,” about privacy law.

From far left: Caroline Kennedy with her mother, Jacqueline, in 1959; with her father, the President, in the early nineteen-sixties; with her brother, John.Clockwise from left: Phillip Harrington / Look magazine collection; Corbis; Robin Platzer / Time Life / Getty

Meanwhile, she was having children. She had her first baby right after she graduated from law school, and by the time “The Right to Privacy” was published, when she was thirty-seven, she had three children—Rose, Tatiana, and John—and she decided that, rather than write another book or take a job of some kind, she would concentrate on raising them. For the next six or seven years, she served on a few boards (the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the American Ballet Theatre, the Citizens Committee for New York City), but basically she was a stay-at-home mother. “I think she understood, as her mother did, that the first responsibility is motherhood and being a good spouse,” Paul Kirk, the chairman of the board of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, says.

In her early forties, she began publishing a series of anthologies. The first, “The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,” had a photograph on the cover of Caroline at age three or four, looking at a book with her mother, and on the back a painting of her mother reading to her brother and herself. The poems (Frost, Shakespeare) are interspersed with more family photos and short reflections by Kennedy on her parents. (“My mother was a true romantic. She lived her life on a dramatic scale and responded to the poetry of love with a passionate intensity.”) “A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children” also came with a cover photograph of her at three or four, this time sitting on a chair looking at a book, next to a Teddy bear sitting on a smaller chair. “A Patriot’s Handbook” collected songs, poems, stories, and speeches celebrating America, with a photograph of her as an adult on the cover. “A Family Christmas,” a selection of poetry, Christmas carols, and excerpts from fiction and nonfiction, had a photograph on the back of herself and her brother and mother, with their Christmas stockings hanging from the mantelpiece. She also edited “Profiles in Courage for Our Time,” a collection of essays about the winners of the Profile in Courage Award, given by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation to elected officials who have taken brave stands. The anthologies all sold extremely well—“The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis” sold close to half a million copies, and “A Family of Poems” stayed on the Times best-seller list for months.

It appears from Kennedy’s commentaries that the anthologies, like her legal books, have a didactic purpose, and are intended for people without prior knowledge of the subject. “Sometimes, poems like these can seem old-fashioned,” she writes in the love-poetry section of her Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis book. “The language is complex, the flowery style at odds with modern life and the changing roles of men and women. But if you do make the effort, you will find that the emotions these poets express are not foreign or faraway but ones that all of us have felt for those we love.” The same book includes, in an appendix, a selection of poetry by her mother. “Although I know my mother would have felt slightly embarrassed to have her own poems included with the ones in this book that she so admired, they have meant a lot to our family, and I wanted to share them,” she writes. “She allowed them to be published during her life, and they reveal a bit about her in her own words. Though writing poetry can seem difficult, I hope these poems will also encourage readers to write poetry of their own.”

During the weeks before Caroline Kennedy withdrew her bid, her friends said that her quest for the Senate seat followed naturally from her work in the New York City public schools. As her kids had neared college age, they said, she had started to think about what she was going to do with the rest of her life, and decided on public service. She cared about education, so she went to work for the schools; she cared about America, so she decided to run for the Senate. But her life and her decision, like most lives and decisions, were more haphazard than that.

In the summer of 2001, she ran into her old college friend Nicole Seligman at a party on Martha’s Vineyard and went for a walk on the beach with Seligman’s husband, Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City schools. They started talking about her life, and she started talking about public service and government. Not long afterward, Klein offered her a job. As the executive director of the Office for Strategic Partnerships, she was charged with raising money for the schools from private companies, and with changing public education’s reputation in the city. Caroline Kennedy did some fund-raising herself, but mostly she visited a lot of schools and planned strategy. Many of the teachers at the schools were thrilled to have such a celebrated person come to visit. And, as always, people came to her because they wanted to help her and be associated with her. A public-relations man she knew persuaded AOL, one of his clients, to sponsor a Dave Matthews Band concert in Central Park and donate a million dollars to the schools. Inspired by the concert, Rosie O’Donnell gave another million. Some months later, Kennedy worked alongside the chairperson of Time, Inc., to organize a giant tag sale in Central Park, selling items that stores would donate.

She quit the job after two years, and although she continued to serve as the vice-chair of the board of the Fund for Public Schools, and spoke to her successor several times a week, for the most part she returned to being a stay-at-home mother. Then Obama appeared on the scene. She didn’t pay much attention at first, but her children thought he was terrific, so she started to tune in to his speeches on television. She watched some of the debates. “She had a real yearning to serve in a more meaningful way than she had up to now,” Gary Ginsberg, an executive vice-president at the News Corporation and a friend, says. “She started really watching the campaign in the fall of 2007, and I could sense then that she had started to think of it in more practical terms for herself.”

It seemed that she knew she was not a natural politician—certainly not a rousing, ecstatic speechmaker. In January, 2008, she endorsed Obama in a speech at American University, and although she had given many endorsement speeches before, she was quite awkward, charmingly so. Dressed with almost overstated understatement in a gray dress and a gray cardigan, she compared Obama to her father—“Fortunately, there is one candidate who offers that same sense of hope and inspiration”—with her mouth in a twisted half smile, as though anticipating the applause with a mixture of joy and embarrassment. When she stated that she was endorsing him, she did so as though she were saying, “Yes, I do realize you already knew what I was going to say.” As she finished her endorsement, the crowd started chanting “Yes we can! Yes we can!” and she joined in, but in a low voice, and wagging her head from side to side as though she were making fun of it, except that she clearly wasn’t—she was making fun of herself for being so self-conscious.

From far left: Caroline Kennedy with her Uncle Teddy, at her wedding, in Hyannis Port, in 1986; campaigning for Barack Obama last February, in Hartford.Left: Harry benson; Right: Chip Somodevilla / Getty

She started to stump for Obama around the country. “She campaigned in places like Orlando and Indiana and Ohio, getting her hands dirty, doing real retail politics, and I think she was surprised by how much she really enjoyed it,” Gary Ginsberg says. “I think she just found the whole political process to be much more satisfying and engaging than she would have thought.” Still, while she was campaigning for Obama, she was in control of her time. She wasn’t required to show up anywhere or do anything in particular: any amount of time she gave to him was a gift for which the campaign was grateful. At one point last year, she was visiting the Obama campaign office in West Palm Beach and was interviewed for a local television station by a small boy about ten years old. They sat on a table, side by side, cases of bottled water stacked behind them against the wall. She was wearing a gray Obama “Hope” T-shirt and a string of pearls; he wore a jacket and tie. Each time he asked a question, he twisted around and aimed his very large microphone right at her mouth, as though carefully feeding a zoo animal. He asked her why she was supporting Barack Obama for President, what were her favorite subjects in school, whether she thought Joe Biden was long-winded (the boy had previously interviewed Biden, he explained, and had been told that that’s what he was), and what “long-winded” meant. She had a faint smile on her face as she answered his questions, but she did not otherwise react to his cuteness with any cuteness of her own. Sometimes while he asked his questions, she gazed around the room, as though she were thinking about something else.

She enjoyed campaigning for Obama, but running for office on her own behalf was different. Drawing attention to herself, asking people to look at her, begging for favors—these were things she’d never had to do. Before the Senate opportunity came along, she’d never been inclined to political arguments, never been one to pontificate about an issue. “I thought she understood her place in the culture,” one friend says. “If you asked her opinion on something, she would back off. She was comfortingly self-effacing.” And what if she lost? What if she didn’t get the job? That would be humiliating. Kennedys don’t like losers, Caroline Kennedy especially. “In the case of the Profiles in Courage awards, she’s made it clear in recent years that she doesn’t always want us to recognize people who are political losers,” John Shattuck, the C.E.O. of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, says. “She wants the award to be given to people who succeed. That was reflected last year in two women she championed who are still in office. And that was quite an interesting philosophical discussion, because I think almost all the cases that her father described”—in the book that inspired the award, “Profiles in Courage”—“were cases of people who paid a huge political price for their actions. She felt that there was more than room for courage in politics among those who are successful.”

Then, there were the legacy issues. She would never know whether people were voting for her or just for a Kennedy. But friends thought that, over the years, she’d grown more comfortable with being a Kennedy, with all that it implied—comfortable enough to run for her Uncle Robert’s old Senate seat. “For Caroline, maybe this is a thing that, ironically, she feels that she can own because it’s so against her nature,” a friend says. “For you to be able to take this kind of step and withstand it—even if you don’t get the appointment, but that you jumped off that cliff—that’s a real psychological accomplishment.” Moreover, by endorsing Obama, at a time when it was not at all clear that he would win the primary, and from Hillary Clinton’s home state, Caroline Kennedy had won the allegiance of a younger constituency on her own behalf. “This generation salutes her and Ted for what they did for Obama,” Al Sharpton said in early January. “I’ll give you an example. When she got out of the car in front of Sylvia’s, people in the streets were screaming ‘Caroline!’ ‘Caroline!’ ‘Senator!’ I was amazed. Young people. And when we walked in, the people in the restaurant stood up and started clapping. And let me tell you why I thought that was interesting: they didn’t react that way to Obama when I brought him there. When I brought Obama there, people were shaking his hand, but they weren’t standing up and applauding. I was like, Wow, what is this? I talked to them, and people said, ‘No, man, she risked a lot for us.’ And, see, when you did something for people that nobody does something for, and you didn’t have to do it, it hits an emotional thing with us.”

And yet, of course, the best argument for appointing Caroline Kennedy to the seat had been that she was Caroline Kennedy. That was her chief value to New York. “There are very few people who walk into the Senate and know they’ll be heard immediately,” Richard Plepler said. “What have two-thirds of the Senate done before they got there? Served in the state legislature? You think that is a better qualification than her intellect, her breadth of experience, her ability to get things done for the state? I don’t think so.” “Let’s say I’m David Paterson and I choose Maloney,” Al Sharpton says, referring to Carolyn Maloney, the downstate congresswoman. “Well, why didn’t you choose somebody that can get President Obama on the phone? He’s gonna have hard questions either way. So it’s almost like, what medicine do you wanna take?”

“She’s the only person that New York can send to the Senate who is immediately valuable to other senators,” Lawrence O’Donnell said. “Because there are really only three people in the Democratic Party who you can say is coming to your fund-raiser and sell tickets from that, and they are Barack and Michelle Obama and Caroline Kennedy. Hillary Clinton had that, too, and that enabled her to have a value to other senators right off the bat that she could then translate into what she could get for New York. . . . Harry Reid, in an unprecedented moment, has said that this is the senator he wants, and that is hugely important for practical purposes—he would have this star player who could be deployed to help get other senators elected. Andrew Cuomo is the only other person whom other people in the Senate have heard of, but, with all due respect, there isn’t a senator in the country who would ask Andrew Cuomo to come to their fund-raiser in his first year in the Senate.”

When Caroline Kennedy first announced her intention to seek the Senate seat, some of her friends were surprised that she would volunteer for such a role, given how shy and reserved she seemed, and how obsessed with maintaining her privacy. (“Jackie and Caroline had similar personalities,” Andy Warhol told C. David Heymann*. “They tended to bury their emotions. They were like icebergs. They revealed only a small portion of themselves—everything else was deeply submerged.”) Unlike her brother, who didn’t usually seem to mind when photographers took his picture or reporters approached him, Caroline Kennedy has always appeared to dislike the press. (She declined to be interviewed for this article.) Her friends understand that to speak about her in public would mean banishment. When she announced her bid for the Senate, she gave a few of her friends permission to speak with reporters, but several of those friends, after making the most anodyne or laudatory comments, panicked and withdrew them, or demanded anonymity. (This was no more than prudence: according to one biography, when a few of her brother’s friends spoke fondly of him to reporters, in the wake of his death, they were told they were no longer welcome at his memorial service.)

She is often sarcastic when she talks to the press, and she can be short to the point of rudeness. She is easily annoyed by what she perceives to be prying or stupid questions. When Wolf Blitzer, of CNN, asked her why Hillary Clinton was not formally vetted by Obama’s Vice-Presidential search committee, of which she was a member, Kennedy interrupted him.

“No, I’m not going to walk you through that decision!” she said indignantly.

“Why not?”

“It’s a confidential process!”

Near the end of an interview after Kennedy’s speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention, Katie Couric started talking about the Kennedy dynasty and what it has meant to America, laying it on a bit thick. Then she began, “Do you ever feel any pressure, I know you’re very shy — ” and Kennedy interrupted her (rather loudly, and not shyly at all): “Are you going to ask me if I’m going to run for office, by any chance? Is that where you’re going with this question?”

Kennedy shook her head in irritated disbelief. “Well, you know, it’s incredible, you’re just so creative.”

“Well, no, but I think people do,” Couric said, trying again, a little taken aback. “Maybe if you have any renewed interest in going into political office, I mean, you already are in public service, but because of Teddy’s illness and because of the era sort of coming to a close, I’m just wondering if you feel any kind of responsibility at all or if you feel completely comfortable with the path you’ve taken.”

“Well, I don’t make a lot of long-range plans.”

But whereas her mother liked to keep her family out of the public eye altogether, insofar as that was possible, with Caroline Kennedy the issue seems to be not so much privacy as control. She is happy to reprint family photographs in her books and sell off intimate family artifacts, as long as she is in charge of the process. She organized two auctions of Kennedy memorabilia, in which she sold family letters, old toys, and bric-a-brac from the family homes. The two auctions brought in about forty million dollars. (“Only the Kennedys could hold a garage sale at Sotheby’s,” Alan Jellinek, a London art dealer, commented*, about the second auction. “It was just a collection of old junk. . . . She sold everything but her mother’s bloomers.”) A few years ago, she permitted the licensing of her mother’s jewelry collection to a company that sold cheap replicas of the pieces, the Jacqueline Kennedy Collection, on QVC.

Caroline Kennedy, it seems, is less private in the sense of secretive than private in the peculiar legal sense that the word has taken on, and that she has written about. For the Supreme Court, “privacy” implies control over one’s body and its use (the right to marry a person of any race, to use contraception, to abort a first-term fetus); for Caroline Kennedy, control over her body and its use encompasses photographs taken, descriptions written, and habiliments abandoned. “Whether it be the disclosure of intimate details about a person’s life or interference with private decisions,” she wrote, with Alderman, in “The Right to Privacy,” “there is a growing sense that all of us, well known and unknown, are losing control.”

So Caroline Kennedy isn’t private in the ordinary sense of the word. “I think there’s a little bit of a misperception about that,” Alderman says. “I agree that she was never in the public eye just to be there, she wasn’t a ‘Here I am’ being in the public eye, but we went on two book tours together, and we were on television, and she was even, way back then, giving speeches to huge crowds and doing campaign work. I wouldn’t describe her as shy. I think she’s tasteful and dignified and didn’t have a sense of self-promotion for the sake of it. But when there was something she was interested in she was out there.” “Addressing a few Democratic Conventions, with twenty thousand people in the hall and twenty million on television—and yet having done that a few times in her life, people still talk about her as this shy, avoid-the-limelight person,” Lawrence O’Donnell says.

Caroline Kennedy has a magic about her that is very useful in politics, and politicians in her family and her party have always used it. For most people old enough to remember her as a child in the White House, and to have been affected by her father’s assassination, she provokes a mixture of benign emotions—nostalgia, respect, excitement, loyalty, pity, love. “One of the senior administrators in one of our schools broke down in tears to meet Caroline Kennedy,” Joel Klein says. “She just couldn’t get over it.” Everywhere Caroline Kennedy goes, people come up to her and tell her how much some member of her family meant to them. They tell her what they were doing and how they felt when her father was killed. They tell her how elegant her mother was, or that they saw her mother walking in Central Park. They tell her they once sat next to her brother at a Knicks game. It never stops. She has been pursued by several stalkers. And it’s not just strangers—it’s friends as well. “No one is ever going to be the one to get off the phone with Caroline,” a friend says. “No one’s going to say ‘I gotta go.’ People just don’t let her go. The circle around her—they think that if they maintain the friendship with her that they’re magic, too.”

If Caroline Kennedy wants someone to help her with a project, if she wants advice, or an expert to explain something to her, virtually anyone will make himself available to her right away. A couple of weeks ago, she asked Sister Paulette LoMonaco, who works at Good Shepherd Services, and whom she knew from her time working in education, to organize expert briefings for her on child welfare and youth services. “I called these people on Sunday night of the long weekend or Monday morning, and everybody cleared their calendars for Tuesday,” Sister Paulette says. “We’re talking about folks who are booked almost every evening. And the e-mails of appreciation were just amazing. Let me read you one: ‘Thank you so much for including me in the meeting, it was an incredible honor to be there, she made us all feel so comfortable, she is very much at ease with herself and this was so evident. I was also really impressed with her intelligence and with her ability to absorb so much information so fast.’ “ When she announced her candidacy for the Senate, a few New York politicians made headlines by resisting her, but many others supported her, even before they’d met. “A few weekends ago, the New York Observer called me and asked me about her, and I said I’d never met her but we all feel like we know her because we’ve watched her grow up, and so the response to her was really quite startling to me,” Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, of New York’s Twenty-eighth District, around Rochester, Buffalo, and Niagara Falls, who endorsed Kennedy, says. “I said a couple of nice things about her, and she was gracious enough to call me.”

While she was in the White House—when she was three, four years old—the public was obsessed with her to the point of madness. Strangers sent her letters. Someone came out with a Caroline Kennedy doll. Press interest in her was insatiable—and while her mother hated the idea of her being in the newspapers, her father tended to encourage it, because it helped him. He would feed cute anecdotes about her to his press secretary. She rode her pony, Macaroni, into the Oval Office; she popped out from behind her father’s desk to offer a perky greeting to Harry Truman (“You lived here before us, didn’t you?”).

Even long after she left the White House, she was badgered by the press. Ron Galella would wait outside her school to shoot pictures of her. “We grew up with her in Life magazine, and it was like she was our friend,” a friend says. “She was heavy, she was unkempt, she had frizzy hair—for someone my age, everything I was going through she was going through. We read about her birthday parties, we read about her in high school, we read about her wedding.” In recent years, she has lived a much more private life, but in one sense in the past decade she has been more than ever the focus of Kennedy reverence: when her brother was alive, when her mother was alive, they created some shade for her, and when they died some of that shade was removed.

It’s hardly surprising that, having seen the world stutter and bumble in her presence all her life, she often finds it ridiculous. How could she not? Her mother was known for her witty derision—she referred to Lyndon Johnson and his wife as “Colonel Cornpone and his little pork chop”—and Caroline Kennedy is also funny. She is wry; she can be scornful. She still has a bit of boarding-school blasé about her—the heavy-lidded eyes, the ironic smile, the husky voice. “Caroline tended to see the foibles in people, whereas John looked for more positive traits,” George Plimpton once said*. “Caroline could cut people down with a few trenchant words; John built them up. She had a dark sense of humor, a rapier wit; his was effervescent. She trusted nobody, he trusted everyone.”

Over the years, she has achieved a certain amount of distance from the phenomenon of Caroline Kennedy—she doesn’t take herself so seriously that she is above using Kennedy worship to her advantage. At her fiftieth-birthday party, George Bell, the husband of her boarding-school roommate, Carrie Minot, read aloud as a toast the flattering e-mails she had sent to a Harvard professor (and then gleefully forwarded to Bell) asking him to rearrange his schedule so she could accompany him on a trip. (He did.)

There’s a brief scene in which she appears in “Taking On the Kennedys,” a documentary about Kevin Vigilante’s race against Patrick Kennedy, son of Teddy Kennedy, when Patrick first ran for Congress, in 1994. She has just flown in on a private plane to stump for him. The press gathers at the airport to meet her, and a television reporter from a local station, WLNE, jostles to the front of the pack and holds his microphone out. He beams at her, and she, in a fuchsia suit and immobile 1994 hair, smiles brilliantly back at him. “How does it feel still being in the public eye, I mean, the name Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy,” he babbles, with a giddy little shrug of his shoulders, as though he can’t quite believe he is standing there talking to her. “How does it make you feel?” She looks at him, still smiling. “How does it make me feel being Caroline Kennedy?” she asks, and laughs at him, her mockery spiced with a tiny hint of flirtation. He tries to rescue his question by rephrasing, but appears to realize that he has had his moment and flubbed it.

Now Caroline Kennedy has had her moment and flubbed it. Paterson has appointed Kirsten Gillibrand, a second-term congresswoman from Hudson, near Albany. “Paterson has no comprehension of upstate New York, absolutely none, and has chosen someone better at representing cows than people,” Lawrence O’Donnell says. “What you have is the daughter of a lobbyist, instead of the daughter of a former President or the son of a former governor. This is the hack world producing the hack result that the hacks are happy with.”

To Caroline Kennedy’s friends, her putting herself forward for the Senate, whatever the result, was a step of great courage and significance. “This is a person who has the blessing of using her remarkable position to advance larger issues,” Richard Plepler says, “and, because she has never taken advantage of that, that is something that speaks to the integrity and, not to be too corny, but, the nobility of what she’s doing now.” “To put yourself through that seems like a lot for her, but I take my hat off to her, because changing your life up and trying things at—you know, she’s not twenty-five—takes a certain amount of guts,” a friend says. “She’s not stupid, she knew that the life she knew would come to an end whether she got the appointment or not, and that’s a tough thing for anyone, giving away the life you’ve had.”

But in the end, it seems, she could not give away the life she had. Despite all the work that her friends and supporters put into her bid, despite all the behind-the-scenes campaigning, despite all the fuss and the coverage and the lunches and the phone calls and the public-relations consultants, she decided that she would prefer not to. Her friends could support her and spin for her and be excited for her, but they couldn’t make her want it. There would be three more days of bad press, and then everyone would forget about it and leave her alone. She would go back to being Caroline Kennedy, and that would be fine. ♦

*** C. David Heymann’s “American Legacy” (2007) was the source of this and the subsequent quotes from Alan Jellinek and George Plimpton. Serious questions have been raised about the credibility of this account.